Culinary adventures!

This trip, like all the others before, is a culinary adventure of extraordinary proportions! The nursing school cafeteria (a concrete room with tables and chairs!) where we are having most of our meals, has provided us with special (not fiery hot) food. We went out back to check out the "kitchen". The ladies clean and chop veggies on the ground, and cook over wood fires in clay and stone pits! Chappatis are all hand rolled and cooked on a long iron griddle. Harry, Phil, Heather, Katie, Beckie and Emily have all been eating Indian style--with their right hand! The rest of us are too inhibited! Eating in the villages is awesome! We have been treated to curry of every kind, flavorful rice with lots of foreign whole pieces of leaves and spices, Indian tea, the local favorite sweet (an awful thing that resembles a flat, greasy donut), snacks that are hard to describe, but are crunchy and tasty, sugar cane stalks, local odd fruits with names like "laykiya" and "cheeku", and the favorite Indian bottled drink called Mazza--mango juice! Steve is being an awfully good sport about the whole thing, as this is wa-a-a-a-y out of his comfort zone! He is surviving well!